


the occasional midnight journey ;

by therentyoupay



Category: Frozen (2013), Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Apartment AU, F/M, Loneliness, Neighbors, Romance, Sleepwalking, loners to friends to ???
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 14:39:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3533099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therentyoupay/pseuds/therentyoupay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Because Elsa is someone who likes to be prepared, who likes to know what kind of problem she is dealing with before she confronts it; Elsa knows nothing about the particular causes of his sleepwalking, only the symptoms, and cares not for actually <em>solving</em> it, per se, because she is not qualified for that sort of thing, but after thirty-six articles from Google and four books from the campus library, she is actually starting to feel slightly better about walking a relatively unconscious young man in a hooded sweatshirt back to his apartment in the middle of the night. Perhaps.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the occasional midnight journey ;

**Author's Note:**

> _3/12/15_. I definitely wrote this in the thick of my four-day cold medicine haze, and in some ways I think it rather shows. (Before I forget: all of the love and gratitude in the world to **Alison** for beta-ing this one-shot, and humoring my lack of functionality and my complete, temporary disregard for spellcheck.) This fic came about because I was working on my other WIPs and I couldn't focus properly, but I still wanted to write... and my newest weaknesses are all of the "AU PROMPTS" posts on tumblr. Lo and behold, I got sucked into another one.
> 
>  **Prompt:** You sleepwalk a lot and sometimes you knock on my door so I have to lead you back to your apartment.
> 
> (P.S. For anyone who's been following my jelsa fanfiction for the last year or so, you know that all of my fanfiction has been from Jack's POV... Consider this one-shot an unexpected treat?)

* * *

**the occasional midnight journey ;**

* * *

When it’s too dark for shadows, Elsa’s neighbor likes to roam the halls.

It starts in the winter of her third year of college, when she’s settled into her quiet routine of short and cozy evenings and uninterrupted studies. She’s seen him once or twice but, despite the almost instinctual need to maintain her air of unfailing politeness, has never made a point of going out of her way to welcome him. It’s a lot of energy to meet new people, she reminds herself. And rarely worth her while.

There aren’t many doors that line her hallway, and she’s never much paid attention to the one at the end until the newest student moves in. He’s perhaps just a year or two younger than her, and Elsa thinks he might be Anna’s age, but then—she’s always comparing everything and everyone to Anna, isn’t she? The point is that until that first night she’d only seen him once or twice, in the long and quiet way that you pass by a familiar stranger without any acknowledgement at all and hope they don’t notice, or that they’re not offended, but it’s not enough to change your mind. The first few weeks of the semester pass on in this manner and it’s not so bad, she thinks, until one day he looks up and recognizes her, actually seems to light up. And then it feels a little like lying.

(The boy seems rather friendly, if a little lonely, and occasionally she’ll greet him with a simple hello. There are days when she thinks he might have tried to catch her eye, maybe once or twice, when she’d been fussing with her keys and pretending not to notice him.)

But Elsa reminds herself that no one her age stays for very long in a building this small in such a quiet part of town, and Elsa has too many other things to think about.

* * *

The first time she hears the floorboards creak is the first night in weeks that she’s awake at an hour she shouldn’t be, when she’s opened a window for a bite of fresh air—too hot, even in the dead of winter—and a knock sounds softly at her door. She stills.

Panic closes in like a familiar collar, but she quells it with the reassurance of cold air sweeping across her fingertips. The walk to the door is swift and silent, but the last two steps are overtaken by the sudden, gripping fear of _my phone was silenced, they couldn’t reach me, something has happened to Anna—_

Terrified but ever cautious, Elsa doesn’t dare open the door without first peeking through the peep hole. She does not expect to see the boy from down the hall.

Suspiciously, Elsa eases open the door with uncertain slowness, and wishes she’d thought to put on a robe.

She struggles to find her voice in the slow, curling recession of worry—the thick kind, silent but fierce, which is only barely worming its way back into the unnoticed trenches of her veins—and impatiently waits for his explanation. Elsa hardly believes this to be a friendly request for a cup of sugar—automatically assumes it to be some sort of prank, or worse—but she is not in the mood for jokes. When the fear finally recedes, the first thing to replace it is anger; she is one breath away from telling him off when she notices that his forehead is pressed to the frame of her door, and he doesn’t actually appear to be looking at her.

At all.

(Elsa knows next to nothing about the phenomenon of sleepwalking, but one thing she _does_ know is that you never, ever wake the sleepwalker in question.)

More than a little rattled and quite annoyed that out of all the doors in the complex this boy had chosen _hers_ , Elsa leans closer and tries to determine what should be done.

Ultimately, Elsa finds it in her to grab hold of the boy’s sleeve and shoulder and carefully steer him back to his door; it has been left ajar, which is as much an irritation as it is a blessing, for Elsa is not quite sure what she would have done if it had been locked behind him. She escorts him inside, then slips out into the hallway behind him without a word, and shuts the door with a soft click in the stillness. She’s thoroughly frazzled, for more reasons than one, and as she pads back down the old carpet to her own apartment, she waits for the swell of relief to find her. She’s glad to have the whole thing over and done with, and worries endlessly about the awkward encounter she’s sure to have tomorrow, and is thankful that she’ll never have to worry about such a strange incident ever happening again.

She’s wrong.

* * *

At least three times a week, he sleepwalks.

(Elsa does not know if there are more, but those are the nights that she finds him outside her tiny apartment, curled up on the floor, head pressed to the frame, just after two o’clock in the morning.)

Because Elsa is the kind of student who likes order and predictability, it does not take her long to realize that sometimes there are patterns, and sometimes there are not. Sometimes there are two knocks and sometimes there are three, and sometimes Elsa considers not answering at all. He comes on Wednesdays and Thursdays and Sundays, and only rarely on Mondays, and she has never once seen him on a Saturday. She always answers.

It takes Elsa a few nights to feel even mildly comfortable with what is shaping up to be something of a bizarre routine. By the second week, Elsa has gone from nonplussed to alarmed and finally: shockingly accustomed to how _typical_ she’s beginning to find this phenomenon, as well as just how much time she seems to be inordinately spending on the boy from down the hall. (Because Elsa is someone who likes to be prepared, who likes to know what kind of problem she is dealing with before she confronts it; Elsa knows nothing about the particular causes of his sleepwalking, only the symptoms, and cares not for actually _solving_ it, per se, because she is not qualified for that sort of thing, but after thirty-six articles from Google and four books from the campus library, she is actually starting to feel slightly better about walking a relatively unconscious young man in a hooded sweatshirt back to his apartment in the middle of the night. Perhaps.)

And so it goes.

On rare occasions, Elsa does eventually see him in the daylight too, although she is determined not to turn it into a production. Now when he catches sight of her and smiles, she nods dutifully in response, then trudges onward in willful determination. It’s not that Elsa is impolite, because she has been brought up better than that, but simply because Elsa does not make friends easily even _when_ she tries, and so she is not quite sure what to do with a boy that she knows but doesn’t know, who probably knows her far less less than she knows him, who sometimes appears at her door unconscious in sweatpants.

She also doesn’t know what his friends call him, or who his friends even are, but she knows from the mailbox downstairs that his name is J. Overland, and over the next few days she comes to know that during the day he is rarely at home. She doesn’t know what he does for a living, or where he might go to school, but she vaguely knows the weight and build of him, the sound of his light and dragging footsteps on threadbare carpet and hardwood. She knows nothing about what he does during the waking hours, but on the nights when he arrives at her doorstep, she gently guides him back to his apartment, to where the door is always left open. It might be a miracle that nothing ever seems to be stolen, except that no one else ever seems to be awake. She doesn’t know what age he is, but she knows that he lives in minimalist clutter, in that he doesn’t seem to own very much, but somehow manages to make a mess of it, anyway.

She suspects that he must have some idea of what happens, even if he can’t necessarily remember the specifics, but he never gives any outward indication of embarrassment or gratitude, so out of respect for his privacy and resolve for her own, Elsa never mentions a word.

Snowstorms come and go, and slowly Elsa grows used to the occasional midnight journeys. It becomes such a natural, strange part of her routine that she often wakes even when he does not arrive, which makes for a very inconsistent circadian rhythm but also allows for calming, quiet cups of herbal tea. She is attuned to his movements now, so much that she can recognize the faint sounds of his footsteps in the hall whether day or night, and some nights Elsa even finds herself waiting with a book on her couch. It would all be very ridiculous, if it were _him_ that she were actually doing any of this for, but of course it’s simply convenience and coincidence and circumstance.

But by the end of the third week, Elsa wonders if she should say something, after all. Mr. Overland clearly has no idea what is going on, and when he moves into another residence it could clearly be a great danger, and doesn’t she have some sort of civic, decent duty to try to prevent that sort of thing? It’s something her father would have done—it’s something _Anna_ would do—which is the only realization Elsa needs to finally feel motivated enough to go through the trouble of navigating such an awkward conversation.

Which is why it is very alarming, even for her, that she doesn’t.

Elsa makes a point of avoiding him as much as possible henceforth, and takes to all but fleeing from him in the rare moments that she runs into him in the lobby or the hall. Even saying _hello_ becomes something of a battle, agonizing and breath-taking and mortifying all at once; he says, _hey_ , sometimes, and during the rare occasions in which she’s caught off-guard, she’ll sometimes say it back, awkwardness on her tongue, before she inscrutably disappears behind the relative safety of closed doors. Elsa makes it a point to disappear as quickly as possibly—because they’ve both learned that if he’s to speak at all, then it must be fast.

He visits three to four times a week, after that.

(So maybe he’s much more lonely than she originally suspected. Elsa is not a fool; she’s always known, in truth, why it’s _her_ door that he compulsively arrives at in the deepest of his sleep, but she also knows that she’s one of the only people in this building close to his age, who may or may not actually see him in the halls, who is admittedly very beautiful, and just because she is _there_ and he _notices_ does not mean that Elsa is obligated to reciprocate anything or… anything.)

She knows she has the unfortunate habit of over-thinking things.

But Elsa is also a rational creature, who eventually calms and realizes that, perhaps, maybe, she is overreacting just the smallest bit. Within a day, she is reassured enough so that her hallway-lobby behaviors return to some semblance of pre-Mr. Overland normalcy, and it’s such a strange part of her day to _focus_ on, and honestly Elsa is beginning to find this whole ordeal quite laughable. Elsa continues on with her life, and their routine, and their one-sided charade.

His visits do not decrease in frequency, however.

* * *

His apartment is obviously smaller and messier than hers even though she tries very hard not to notice anything around her while she’s inside. Sometimes it works, and _sometimes_ she notices that he has very few items at all, like her. That most of the room is occupied by empty space, like it’s waiting for something to fill it up. There are framed pictures scattered about, and in them he looks very lively, but not many of them appear to be very recent. Elsa wonders about the people in them, especially about the younger girl who looks like him, which is just about the moment when she usually remembers herself, and makes some weak attempt to lay him down over the cushions of the living room couch, then gently closes the door shut behind her.

* * *

“You wouldn’t be avoiding me, would you?” he asks, having waited until the precise moment that she has paused to retrieve her mail.

Elsa has the self-discipline not to glare, but it does not come easy.

His smirk is teasing and light, tipped with something like amusement but too nervous to be true, and Elsa could have seen through his facade of arrogance from a mile away, so the mere foot or so between them does nothing to bolster his confidence; it does, however, somehow improve hers.

“Should I have a reason to?” she asks plainly, arching an inquisitive brow high. He laughs, but it’s more like a nervous chuckle, and Elsa revels in it. She glances through the many envelopes in her hand, counting: four from Anna, two from the university, one from the bank, from her father’s inheritance fund. Elsa momentarily loses her train of thought.

“I hope not,” he parries back, and when Elsa looks up, it’s clear that his hope—over _what_ , Elsa cannot say—is visibly renewed, and butterflies promptly erupt in her stomach. She can see where his lips curve lightly over the bright ridge of his teeth, tells herself not to be distracted by such things; this is exactly as she feared it would be, after all.

“Then there’s no need to worry,” she quips, with a degree of saccharine that does not sit entirely right, and she closes her mailbox shut with a satisfying click. It sounds much louder and more final than she’d intended, but she tells herself that she does not care. She pivots on her heel, as if to turn.

“My name is Jack,” he introduces himself, like he has not just answered one of the most vital questions on Elsa’s mind for the last month. Like he would _like_ for them to be friends. Elsa’s fingertips still over the sharp edges of the envelopes she holds, and searches for the right thing to do. The silence drains him of his bravado, apparently, because he tacks on a meager, “By the way.”

Carefully, Elsa looks back over her shoulder at him. He looks very earnest, and his face looks so much more genuine without the smirk of mischief— _but not quite the way it does in sleep_ —and that’s it, that is the end of her foolish consideration. _You are too busy_ , she reminds herself. _You don’t know how to talk to people,_ she adds, and considers him with deep, scouring eyes. He shifts under her scrutiny, but doesn’t retreat, and Elsa wonders why. _You only know how to be a friend to Anna._

“Elsa,” she answers, without any fanfare or invitation, but his resulting smile makes her feel like there might have been, anyway.

“Hey,” he says, grinning shyly, and for once, she says it back.

* * *

She makes a point of neither avoiding nor inviting his attention, and instead remains on neutral ground; Jack is much more likely to seek her out than to give her space, and Elsa tells herself that it should _bother_ her that she doesn’t mind. He rushes after her when he spots her coming down the hall in the late evenings when he’s just arrived, and he holds the door for her as they leave in the early morning, and he makes small-talk and harmless jokes when he thinks he can get away with it. The disconcerting part, however, is that most of the time—he can.

Another week or two passes, and Jack grows bolder with his attempts at conversation, while Elsa meanwhile struggles to remember why she’s so against them in the first place. _You’re not very good at being with other people_ , she tells herself, then wonders if it’s true; Jack doesn’t seem to mind her thoughtful silences, or the indifference she often wears on her face, whether she wants to or not. He laughs even when she only smiles, and he talks enough for the two of them, although Elsa most certainly can hold her own when the topic is worth discussing. It’s a funny thing, this neighborly ruse, but Elsa isn’t so sure she’s willing to change it.

At least once during every conversation, Elsa is seized by the urge to tell him—to ask him?—but she never brings it up.

* * *

On a Thursday night near the end of February, he knocks.

No. He _actually_ knocks.

“Oh,” says Elsa, when she opens the door. “I wasn’t expecting…”

She’s not quite sure how to put it, and is momentarily amused by the absurdity of it all. Elsa does have a sense of humor, contrary to what the rest of the world may think. However, her uncharacteristic trail of silence has apparently offered implications that she did not intend, and the one that a crestfallen Jack has interpreted evidently is: I wasn’t expecting _you_.

Which is almost half-true, if she’s being honest. She wasn’t expecting him _awake_ and, oh dear god, that sounds awful.

“Hey,” he laughs, and he’s blushing a little now, and what in heaven’s name is she supposed to do with a blushing boy on her doorstep at near midnight? (She knows what _Anna's_ answer would be, but enough of that.) “Sorry. I hope I didn’t wake you.” His eyes widen, just slightly, and Elsa realizes that she’s never seen this expression on his face before. It’s interesting. “Wait,” he whispers, mortified. “Did I?”

Elsa bites back a smile. Realizes too late that it results in her licking her lips. Jack notices.

“No,” she answers, as neutrally as she can. “You didn’t. Is everything all right?”

“What? Oh. Yeah. I just—I noticed your light on through the door,” he explains. His movements—his hands, his neck, the tilt of his head—all shift with a practiced, suave sort of grace, but his words are just as much a mess as his living room clutter: rather limited, but still just enough to be noticed. It’s an interesting contradiction.

She wonders if he’s used to tripping over his words.

“I couldn’t sleep and… I don’t know. Was wondering if you wanted to go raid one of the places around the corner for a bite to eat. Or drink, or something.”

Elsa’s lips part in wordless fascination. _Couldn’t sleep?_ Elsa recaptures a vision of her computer screen in the dark, of a series of words flitting past her line of vision at four in the morning over the wisps of steam from her tea. _Sleep-deprivation is one of the most powerful triggers for somnambulism,_ she recalls.

Elsa wonders if he realizes that he looks to the ceiling more than to the floor when he’s speaking. She wonders how long he’s been planning to approach her with this, or if it was an impulse that dragged him out of bed… instead of the usual reasons, anyway.

“I’m not very hungry,” is what she answers, because it’s honest, and because she doesn’t want to give him the wrong idea.

“Right. Yeah, no—sort of a random question. And like, super late—“

“But I wouldn’t mind going for a walk,” she adds, because she likes the snow, and she likes the way it looks at night, and maybe stretching his legs with some activity will do him some good, and also, she’s not really sure what the wrong idea really _is_ anymore.

“Oh,” says Jack, like he’s trying not to grin. “Okay.”

And honestly, this isn’t exactly too far a deviation from their usual routine, anyway.

* * *

On another Friday night, he comes. Elsa retrieves her key from its new resting spot on the shelf near the door, and wraps her robe more tightly around her waist. Her neighbor is already on the floor, leaning against the wall, shoulder and temple and dead weight against fraying wallpaper, and without hesitation Elsa gently takes hold of his arm and fluidly lifts him to his feet—“Stand up, Jack,” and he does—then steers him back toward his room. She counts her blessings and silently scolds him under her breath all at once, because he _always_ leaves the door open, the careless fool.

Until the night he doesn’t.

Tonight.

Elsa’s steps come to a halt in the middle of their hallway, trapped halfway between his door and hers; this is impossible, Elsa thinks, because out of every single night that this phenomenon has occurred, Jack has never actually shut the door behind him.

It’s scary, almost, how quickly the panic comes flooding back into her limbs. She hadn’t quite realized it, in fact—just how comfortable and complacent she’d grown over the last few weeks. The predictable comfort in a rather peculiar situation: the give-and-take of retrieving and returning Mr. Overland back to his dwellings, then slipping off into the night and pretending it never happened. That avenue is closed to her now.

Belatedly, Elsa realizes that her agitation is starting to have an effect on _him_. Of course.

But Elsa has been in situations far worse than this before, and like hell if she’s going to fall apart now, over something that is probably closer to nothing. She unlatches herself from the sleeve of his sweatshirt, and takes a wide step away, breathing in as deeply and as calmly as she possibly can, and focuses. Her priority, for the moment, is Jack.

All disconcerting notions associated with this revelation will obviously be left for later consideration.

In the meantime, Elsa takes a bracing inhale of solid night air. She wrings her hands once, twice—

“Jack,” she says, very soft. “Come this way.”

And, as he usually does—in this state or any other—Jack listens.

Elsa is only really half-aware of what she’s going to do the moment before she does it. She is a planner by practice and trade but an impulsivist by nature, and the two have never really allowed for harmony inside her head, but tonight her decisions are flying from her fingertips—in the quick, quiet turn of her door handle, or the swift and certain step she takes as she opens the door, or the gentle command, “Jack—go lie down.”

And just like any other strange and fascinating piece of this truly confusing puzzle, Jack follows these commands as easily as if he’d made the decisions himself—as if he were dreaming them, as if he’d always been planning on doing them, anyway, and was only just getting around to it.

Like lying down on her living room sofa, for example.

Splendid.

Elsa takes one more final glance out into the empty, darkened hallway, then carefully shuts her door. Tries to remember every note in every clinical article she’s read about the proper ways to awaken someone is such a deep state of sleep—touch is out of the question, both for his safety, and hers—and comes up inexplicably short.

Jack Overland is out cold on her living room couch, in bare feet and dark gray sweatpants and a blue hooded sweatshirt, and Elsa decides that the only reasonable thing to do is to brew herself a hot cup of tea.

After a single moment of consideration, she brings down an extra mug from the cabinet. Stares at the mugs thoughtfully on the fake granite countertop.

She likes the sight of the two of them together a lot more than she should.

* * *

It is nearly three in the morning, and Elsa is poring over the two latest articles on the pros/cons debate between letting sleepwalkers drift out of sleep _gradually_ or prompting them awake through action, and it is just as Elsa is about to lose her mind to indecisiveness that Jack’s body suddenly jerks where it lies, convulses violently without noise or reason, and Elsa promptly knocks over the stack of books on the desk in her haste to stand.

Which leaves Jack gasping upright at the abrupt and heavy thudding of books unceremoniously falling to the floor, and Elsa, wide-eyed and breathing heavily, standing over him just beyond the rise of the couch.

At first she says nothing, not because she has the sense to let him adjust and weave his way out of the disorientation himself, but because her heart is in her throat and she’s not quite sure exactly when it got there. He’s blinking in the lamplight and clutching fiercely at the cushions beneath him, and in his eyes there is a healthy dose of suspicion, a shock of blue determination, and the slightest flash of fear.

Or maybe that’s only what she imagines.

Elsa swallows, heavy and thick. “Jack?” she whispers, in another attempt to be soothing and gentle or any of the many other things she’s always tried to be. She cannot tell if it works.

Suspicion quickly warps into confusion, into creeping awareness, into full-blown _where the hell am I?_ , and shortly after that is something that Elsa recognizes all too well, even on someone else’s face: embarrassment.

“ _Elsa_ ,” he warbles, and he covers his embarrassment over the huskiness of his voice and the subsequent crack by coughing faintly into his fist. “I—what am I—?” She can watch the realizations unfold in the deepening blush on his cheeks, as his world slowly, painfully clicks into place around him. It occurs to him that he is in a new apartment, which deductively _could_ be hers, in the same moment it occurs to her that his sweatpants have ridden unnervingly low on his hips.

This is going to be a problem.

“Where—? I’m sorry, I don’t—?”

“Jack,” she interrupts firmly, with the sort of command that she is so much more comfortable with—upfront, no hiding, just getting straight to the point. He stiffens, just a little, and Elsa reminds herself to _breathe_.

“I… didn’t do anything stupid, did I?” Jack asks slowly, before she has a chance to say any more. Elsa looks at him then, at his disheveled hair and his slightly-too-wide eyes and his pinkened cheeks, and listens to carefully to the silence hanging in the air. His face is solemn with the kind of rational sobriety that only very _real_ fear can bring about, and she wonders just exactly what it is that he thinks he might have done.

Her hesitation may very well give him a hernia.

“No,” she answers, before he can wind himself up any tighter. Elsa forcefully pushes the resulting mental images from her head. “I don’t think so,” she adds, though it sounds less certain.

“Should I…? Should I have some sort of explanation, or something?”

Elsa can’t help it; she bites back a smile, and realizes too late that she’s licking her lips and almost-not-really-possibly smiling down at him in the dim light of her apartment.

Jack notices.

“Hold on a minute,” she orders sternly, though the gleam in her eyes might give her away, and Jack watches on in helpless confusion as she flits to the kitchen and back, holding two cups of relatively-warm- _what-the-hell_ tea. For two.

Jack looks ready to crack.

And for the first time since he has met her, Elsa can’t hold it in. She opens her smile, and laughs.

* * *

Jack is nursing his cup of lukewarm tea with both hands, and looks like he suspects he might still be dreaming.

He’s sitting on the couch, so she’s opted to sit on the floor, and between them sits the coffee table with her mug and two coasters, and of course, the cup that still rests in his lap. Jack seems to be holding onto it as some sort of protective anchor, or life support, and Elsa supposes she cannot fault him for the uncharacteristic dodginess, though she finds his weapon of defense rather funny; Elsa is not known for her tea.

“So… I… guess I have a feeling I know how I got here,” Jack slowly admits, embarrassment rolling off of him in waves, and Elsa takes note: he said _how_ he got here, not _why_. She takes a delicate sip of her tea.

“Jack,” she begins, very cautiously, if only because she’s beginning to feel something thrumming beneath her skin, something desperate and warm, and she has the very faroff notion that at some moment in the very near future, she might explode. “Are you aware that you sleepwalk?”

The barest, briefest of moments, and then Jack’s head falls to his knees with a mournful groan, with enough force that a splash of tea spills onto her floor. (Elsa sips her own, and pretends not to notice.) She lets him sit that way for a moment, stewing in his own mortification, before he finally lifts his shoulders and places his mug on the coaster. Slowly raises his eyes to meet hers.

“Shit,” is the first thing that he says, and it might have offended her, if not for the distracting way Elsa is actually very captivated by the light and shadows on his jaw. By the almost harsh lines of his cheeks and the dark circles beneath his eyes. “ _Shit_ , I am so sorry. This is—it doesn’t happen very often, I promise, and it hasn’t happened in like, at _least_ a few years, not since I was a kid. Seriously, I swear. _God._ “

Elsa says nothing, mostly because she’s still trying to decide what to say. His mortification is almost palpable, and Elsa thinks that she should rush to reassure him, but there’s something about the intensity of his openness—his harsh sincerity and apologetic mortification and the ugly, honest truth—that appeals to her in a fascinating way. There is a tension in her limbs that was not there an hour before, and there is a tension in the air that she can almost taste on her tongue—even if Jack is still too stunned to see it.

 _For the moment_ , her mind whispers.

“It’s all right,” she promises, on neutral ground, and drags the tip of her finger over the handle, all along the curve. She’d shrug, if she felt he’d notice. “I don’t mind.”

She stares into the pool of her tea, and feels his eyes on her. Feels when his gaze hardens beneath the tide of shifting thoughts, the pieces and puzzles and connecting the dots and—

“I… this hasn’t… happened _before_ ,“ Jack states, and if he weren’t already so flushed, he’d have gone pale. Elsa takes the final sip of her tea, and places it carefully on the table, off to the side. With obvious reluctance, Jack manages a truly dreadful, “Has it?”

Elsa licks her lips, and very deliberately holds onto her answer. She revels in the feeling of warm lamplight on her skin, and anticipation, and his eyes—watching her.

The thrumming grows bolder.

“I need to show you something,” she answers, with just a hint of deviousness, and bites her lips to hide her smile at the considerable paleness he has just developed in a matter of seconds. (Is she enjoying this? Teasing him—on purpose?) And before she can dwell on _that_ , she rises to her feet. Jack follows, probably more on blind instinct than anything else. When he comes to stand beside her desk in a daze—when he actually seems to look up for the first time and take in his surroundings… until he notices her watching him look around shamelessly at all of her things—Jack immediately snaps his attention to the book she’s holding out in her hands. And then stills.

“Son…ambulance,” he murmurs, brows drawing together in furious little knots of thought. Elsa watches his face, unabashedly, as he deepens his frown and mutters, “What the hell is that?”

Elsa leans into his side, almost imperceptibly, as she points to the summary on the back and explains what she’s learned over the past six weeks; when his breath hitches, and his spine stiffens, and his whole body warms—she notices.

* * *

It’s five in the morning by the time they find themselves on the floor against the couch, with books and printed articles sprawled out all around them. Elsa feels a little delirious with exhaustion, and as the night wears on Jack only looks closer and closer to death warmed over—and she’s probably much the same—but deliriousness leads to laughter and laughter leads to closeness and closeness leads to _Jack, you’re supposed to be reading page seventy-two_.

“I’m not tired,” he tells her, when she suggests that he finally try for some sleep, the fourth time she’s caught him staring at her too close, and the way he sways with the words does not help his point. Eventually, he concedes, “I can’t sleep.”

“Can’t… or won’t?”

Jack considers this. “I dunno. Maybe both.”

Elsa looks around at the utter mess they’ve made, their quilted blankets of internet article sheets and the array of open, bookmarked encyclopedias, at the easy way he’s sprawled out halfway underneath her coffee table. She’s right next to him, and she’s somehow managed to be both completely unaware and _completely_ aware of this for the last hour or so, and (not so) suddenly, she has an idea.

“All right,” she says, and gently places her head on his shoulder.

His shoulder is rather sharp, but what it lacks in softness is more than made up for in warmth. Elsa is already breathing a deep sigh of contentment by the time she hears the slightly-panicked, slightly-warbled, “Elsa?”

Her grin widens, but she does not open her eyes. “I’m tired,” she answers, like it’s half a confession. Like she’s exhausted and nervous and grateful all at once, and she’s willing _to let there be more meaning to all of this_ , if only he’s willing to find it. Like being tired, and being tired of being lonely, is simply reason enough.

And for now, she thinks it kind of is.

* * *

 

 

 


End file.
